


Date Night

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Firestorm (Comics), Justice League of America's Vibe (Comics)
Genre: Autistic Cisco Ramon, Brief Mention of Underage Drinking, F/M, Fluff and Humor, M/M, autistic characters, autistic jason rusch, cindy is a badass, couples who fight monsters together stay together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 10:47:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12297618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: Cindy and Cisco try to have a nice date. So do Jason and Ronnie. Things don't go according to plan.





	Date Night

**Author's Note:**

> Listen. You can't tell me that these four are based out of Detroit but still haven't met and gotten along and gone on dates. Because they absolutely have.

“This is nice,” Cisco announced, beaming at Cindy. “Just a normal date night between two totally normal people. Just us. I like this.”

“You’re going to jinx it,” Cindy warned, crossing her arms and leaning back in her chair as she glanced around. “You of all people should know that when it comes to us, there’s no such thing as a normal date night.”

“Yeah, but I can  _ hope  _ for one, right?” Cisco argued. “There hasn’t been a breacher all week, and Gunn  _ promised  _ they’d be able to handle it if one showed up unexpectedly. Tonight is just us. A nice, normal date night.”

“Just because you keep saying it doesn’t make it true,” Cindy laughed.  _ “Something  _ is going to happen. Trust me.”

* * *

“You know that we could’ve just gone to the movies or something, right?” Jason raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have to spend all this money.”

“It wasn’t  _ that  _ expensive,” Ronnie said with a shrug. He adjusted the tiny bowtie that he’d thrown on at the last minute. “Besides, we  _ never  _ get to do anything nice without some sort of world-ending catastrophe interrupting us.”

Jason kissed his cheek, standing up a little bit in the booth because Ronnie was so much taller. “Don’t jinx it, Boy Band.” He looked around, chewing on his lower lip. “I just don’t know if there’ll be anything here that I can eat. Most fancy places don’t have safe foods.”

Ronnie beamed. “I checked to make sure that they had stuff you could eat. I  _ told  _ you, I want us to have a nice night.”

Jason glanced down at the menu, blushing a little. “You remembered?”

“Of course, Jace.” Jason rolled his eyes, a little surprised to find that Ronnie’s habit of giving people dumb nicknames didn’t bother him much anymore. Ronnie continued. “What kind of boyfriend would I be if I forgot?”

“Tonya reminded you, didn’t she?” Jason said, deadpan. 

Ronnie turned dark red. “That’s not important. What’s important is having a nice night. With  _ no  _ supervillain attacks.”

* * *

Halfway through dinner, Cisco started to get a headache.

“Are you okay?” Cindy leaned forward, eyes flickering around. “I have a toy in my pocket if you need it.”

“Keep saying things like that and people will start to get the wrong idea,” Cisco joked weakly, one hand coming up to massage his temple. “S’ not an overload, and I have a chew underneath my shirt. It’s a-y’know. Breacher headache.” He banged his other hand on the table. “I just want  _ one night.  _ One good, normal night. Is that too much to ask?”

“I told you not to jinx it,” Cindy reminded him mildly, holding out a pair of Advil. “Take these. Can you tell if it’s close by?”

Cisco swallowed the pills, grimacing a little. “Yeah. It’s close by. Gunn said that they’d handle any breachers, but… What if it hurts someone before ARGUS gets there?”

“You worry to much, babe.” Cindy leaned over the table and gave him a kiss. “Text Gunn if it’ll make you feel better. Tell him there’s a breacher over here and we don’t want it to interrupt our one night off all week.”

Cisco nodded and pulled out his phone, other hand flicking anxiously. “Okay. Okay. You’re right. This’ll be fine, we can still have a nice night.”

An enormous crashing sound from the back of the back of the restaurant, toward the kitchens, interrupted him. Cisco and Cindy went stiff and still and swivelled their heads in unison as the crash was followed by a piercing scream. Several other people looked over, and Cisco gripped Cindy’s hand under the table. Cindy groaned.

“I  _ told  _ you not to jinx it,” she snapped, jumping up as her skin and clothes rippled. Cisco glared at her a little bit. He was definitely jealous of his girlfriend’s ability to be able to be in her costume in seconds (kind of. She wasn’t actually wearing it, but she could cast illusions to make it  _ look  _ like she was, and that was what mattered). And fuck, Cisco hadn’t brought his own costume to their date night, had he? Why would he! He’d thought that he wouldn’t need it!

Ugh.

Well, at least nobody would see his face if he vibrated it at the right frequency. Cisco was going to feel weird for a month, like he always did, but whatever. It was fine. It was  _ fine. _

* * *

Jason jumped as a scream tore through the restaurant. “What the hell was that?”

“Trouble,” Ronnie grumbled. People were starting to get up and run away. “Of course it is. Because we can’t go one day without the supervillain of the week trying to kill innocent people.”

“You’re the one who was so ready for us to be superheroes,” Jason pointed out. 

Ronnie snickered. “I’m not the one who did experiments on himself to try to get his nuclear powers back, am I?”

Jason pulled a sour face, standing up as another crash sounded. “We have to do something.”

Ronnie grabbed his hand as he grinned, bowtie a little lopsided. “Of course. Firestorm?”

“Firestorm,” Jason confirmed, the hand Ronnie was holding growing warmer.

For a moment they were surrounded in a glowing pillar of flame, and then Firestorm took their place, heat surrounding them like a protective bubble. Ronnie grinned. “So, where’s the bad guy? Or girl? Uh, bad person?”

Jason sighed and looked out through Ronnie’s eyes, glancing around.  _ “The noise came from the kitchens, which means-oh, god.”  _

He went silent, which made Ronnie nervous. Jason being quiet was never a good thing in his experience. “Jace? You okay in there?”

_ “Ronnie, look to your left,”  _ Jason whispered.

Ronnie looked to the left and almost had a heart attack. “Holy-what the hell is that thing?!”

It looked like a slimy green golf ball, with a pair of bowed legs and six arms that ended in clawed, humanoid hands. Elephant-like tusks jutted out of its wide mouth, while an impressive crest of antlers- _ “Horns,”  _ Jason corrected,  _ “they’re not antlers, they’re horns.” _ -curled out from its skull. Small skeletal wings that couldn’t have been big enough to support it in flight flapped as it roared, and a heavy crocodilian tail lashed behind it, upending a table and causing a trio of men to duck for cover.

There was also a girl with dark curly hair and light brown skin trying to stab it in the skull from where she was perched on top of it, crouched amongst the sharp horns.

“And who the hell  _ is  _ that?” Ronnie asked aloud, swooping a little closer and almost banging his head into one of the light fixtures. “She’s cute. Not my type, but cute.” Jason made an affronted sound and Ronnie grinned. “Seriously, though, who is she? I thought we were the only superheroes in Detroit, outside of that one member of the Justice League of America.”

“Maybe she’s not a superhero,” Jason suggested. “Just a brave civilian.”

“Well, whoever she is, she’d better get out of the way.” Ronnie readied a blast in his hands. “Hey, you! Look out!”

The girl’s head snapped up, her eyes just barely narrowing as she wrenched her dagger out of the monster’s skull (which was now leaking a viscous green fluid that must’ve been the creature’s blood) and easy vaulted off of it, landing on a table.

Ronnie pulled his hand back and lobbed a fireball at the monster’s head, right as a translucent  _ something  _ smashed into it from the other side. The creature  _ screamed,  _ and Jason hissed a warning into Ronnie’s ear.

_ “Look out!” _

Ronnie easily dodged the table that the monster threw at him, eyes narrowed. “Is that the best you got, ugly?”

He swung back around, ready to land another hit, only to stop short. A blurry figure, literally  _ vibrating, _ was standing in front of the monster, one hand outstretched. The monster was making a high pitched keening sound, starting to shake just like the person(?) was. The screaming grew louder, and Ronnie winced as he clapped his hands over his ears.

Jason made a whimpering sound, and Ronnie realized that it must’ve been ten times worse for him. Before he could actually do anything about it, like try to send soothing happy thoughts down their mental link (Stein had been teaching them how), the monster swelled up like a balloon-

-And exploded in a wave of green goop with chunks of red.

“Ew,” Blurry Person said, vibrating even more to let the goo that had landed on them fall through onto the floor.

“I thought you didn’t usually explode them for this exact reason?” The girl picked up a chunk of exploded monster and poked at it.

Blurry Person shuddered. “Cindy, that’s disgusting.”

The girl, who must’ve been Cindy, shrugged and dropped her piece of monster. “I wanted to see what it felt like. You’re always licking weird things to see how they taste.” She looked up at Ronnie and Jason, clearly unimpressed. “You’re covered in guts.”

“What? Oh, ew, gross.” Ronnie wriggled a little bit, focusing on adjusting his molecules to let the disgustingly slimy stuff fall right through him-which was  _ much  _ harder than it looked. “What the hell was that thing? And who are you?”

_ “That  _ was a breacher. Catch-all name for people and monsters from other dimensions,” Blurry Person explained. “I’m Vibe, and this is Cindy. Or Charmer.”

_ “Isn’t Vibe a member of the JLA?”  _ Jason narrowed his eyes, which inadvertently caused Ronnie’s eyes to do the same.

“Yeah,” Ronnie muttered. “But shouldn’t he have better things to do than destroy restaurants?” Louder, he said, “I’m Firestorm. Nuclear-powered superhero. Nice to meet you.”

Ronnie extinguished his hand and held it out for Vibe and Charmer to shake.

Vibe took it, which felt  _ really  _ weird. “I know. I’ve seen you on the news before. Who are you talking to?” They nodded to Ronnie’s ear. “You got comms?”

“No. Sometimes. It’s complicated,” Ronnie sighed, pulling his hand back. “You’ve really seen me on the news?”

“You do good work,” Cindy said shortly before Vibe could answer. “Not always very efficient, but good work.” She pulled out her phone from a skirt that… Didn’t appear to have any visible pockets. It had almost looked like Cindy’s hand went  _ through  _ her skirt. “I’ll tell Gunn we got the breacher taken care of.”

Vibe nodded to themselves. “Alright. I’ve still got one more thing I need to do.”

Purposefully, they walked over to the largest chunk of monster, took a deep breath, and started kicking it.

“Why”-kick-“can’t”-kick-“I”-kick-“have”-kick-“a”-kick-“nice”-kick-“date!” Vibe yelled, ending with a punch to the chunk of flesh that caused it to explode. They stood there panting for a second, and Ronnie realized that their date with Cindy must’ve been interrupted by the ‘breacher’ just like his and Jason’s had been. “All I wanted was to have a nice night, but  _ no!”  _ Vibe threw their hands up. “We had to get attacked by the  _ one  _ breacher that’s shown up in Detroit all week.”

“I told you not to jinx it,” Cindy said sympathetically, resting her hand on their shoulder.

_ “That’s what  _ I  _ told  _ you,” Jason reminded Ronnie, trying not to sound as smug as he felt.

Ronnie rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah.”

Vibe looked up at him. “You know, you two can do… Uh… Whatever it is that you do to separate. You don’t even have to tell me your real names-it’s not like I’ll automatically know them when I see your faces. And this restaurant has no security cameras, even if my presence didn’t make them useless in the first place.” At Ronnie and Jason’s shared shocked expression, they grinned. “You’ve got a unique frequency. And within that frequency, there’s two individual ones. I figured you two got stuck together in a lab accident.” They paused. “Also, I saw you two hold hands and then turn into a fireball that left only one person standing.”

Ronnie blushed orange, sending a half-formed question down the link in Jason’s direction.

Jason sent a mental shrug back, which kind of tickled in Ronnie’s head.  _ “I mean, he already knows we’re two people. And what Professor Stein doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, we don’t have to actually tell him our real names. And like he said, Vibe’ll only know our faces, not our actual secret identities. Plus, he’s a member of the Justice League of America! If anybody’s trustworthy, it’s them. It’s your choice, though.” _

“Look at you, breaking rules,” Ronnie laughed aloud, letting go of Jason’s consciousness. “Wait until Tonya hears.”

Jason rolled his eyes as he and Ronnie split apart. “We are  _ never, ever  _ speaking of this again, Boy Band.”

Ronnie rolled his eyes and looked back at Vibe and Cindy. “Now are  _ you  _ going to lose the vibration?”

Vibe smiled again, voice losing the distortion as their blurry quality abruptly ceased to be. “It’s only fair,” they agreed. “You can keep calling me Vibe. Should I just call you two Firestorm, or…?”

“Codename time!” Ronnie said gleefully. Jason rolled his eyes. “I’ll be-”

“You can call him Boy Band,” Jason interrupted him. 

Ronnie mock scowled at him. “Fine. Then you can call  _ him  _ Jace.”

Jason elbowed him. “Don’t listen to him.”

“Alright, Boy Band, Jace,” Cindy said, and Ronnie groaned loudly. “Should we try to salvage this evening, or…?”

“There’s nobody else here,” Jason said with a shrug as he looked around. “We didn’t even get our food…”

“Hey, we can just steal theirs,” Vibe suggested while pointing to an abandoned large table for six that had already received their order. “We can all sit at it, too! I don’t think anybody’s going to come back since the walls are covered in breacher guts.”

Ronnie didn’t need any other urging to toss himself down in one of the chairs and start digging into the stranger’s meal. Jason rolled his eyes and sat down next to him, digging around for a second until he found something he knew he liked. Cindy kissed Vibe on the cheek and sat down beside Ronnie, who asked her about the knife she was starting to clean on the tablecloth with his mouth full of food. Vibe sat between Cindy and Jason, reaching to grab some water.

“What, no wine?” Ronnie joked with pasta sauce smeared all over his nose, nodding to the half full wineglass next to the water cup.

Vibe blinked at him slowly. “I’m not old enough to drink…”

“Neither are we,” Jason said. Ronnie opened his mouth and Jason glared at him.  _ “Neither. Are. We.” _

Just because Ronnie  _ had  _ gotten drunk before didn’t mean that they had to make it a habit or anything.

Luckily, Cindy found some unopened soda cans after searching the kitchen (where the breacher had first appeared) and passed them around, though Jason passed up on it. Carbonated things made his head hurt and it was like his mouth was getting stabbed with a hundred tiny needles. No thanks.

Vibe leaned forward on their elbows. “You know what? I think this date might’ve actually a been a success.”

Ronnie bumped their soda cans together. “Yay for dates that turn out well despite having a potential catastrophe part of the way through!”

Jason leaned back and laughed a little.

Ever since he and Ronnie had become Firestorm, they’d been making friends in the superhero business. But none of them except Stargirl had been this close to their age. It was nice.

Maybe he and Ronnie should go on double dates more often.


End file.
